First Friday June 5 : EN Hong : Sean Peuquet

First Friday June 5 : EN Hong : Sean Peuquet

“Sin-Yeoseong – 신여성 – New Women” EN Hong

In a shrinking world, increasingly interconnected by invisible tunnels burrowed deep within our consciousness and in-between the many devices that have become our infinite extenders, to be one thing and one thing alone is impossible. Modern life is a series of concurrent identity performances defined by concentric circles beyond our individual control: nationality, gender, socioeconomic status, shifts in global hegemony, technology, education, ancestral lines, migration patterns, love, and coincidence. While this has always been true, every generation has experienced such evolution at an exponentially accelerated speed.

Korean-born artist EN HONG explores how tectonic cultural collisions, put in motion by the ‘New Women’ of 1920’s colonial Korea, and catalyzed by the Korean war, have shaped feminine identity in modern Korea. Through her depictions of 21st century Ulzzang Girls’ paradoxical embrace of Western beauty ideals she presents a world where traditionalism fought modernity, patriarchy grappled with feminism, capitalism met communism, and the women of Korea were thrust into the center of a global cultural whirlpool.

Appearing to Appear

recent intermedia works by Sean Peuquet

Sometimes things just appear to appear—like when our search for what’s real results in a commodified reality being sold back to us, a reality that becomes an appearance of itself. Food products, television shows, politically correct social sentiments, photographic images, music performances, and so on all exhibit this tendency to some extent, a tendency that was already prefigured by Duchamp’s readymades and Cage’s silence.

Each time reality is framed, our observational position gets complicated: are things appearing as they are not?; or, are things just appearing to appear (hiding the fact that they simply are what they appear to be)? I don’t know how to decide on what’s real, todistinguish between ever-subtler gradations of fake, to establish the authentic from the inauthentic, truth from lie. And perhaps art is responsible for some of this confusion. But I also think art can help us to invert the question, and ask not, “how are we to decide on what’s real?”, but rather, “how does reality flex and yield to the decidable?” My work is focused on this more speculative question— designed to catch the viewer or listener in an impasse, in a forced choice, in recognition of a reality that is not yet completely the art it appears to be.

Join us for an opening reception with the Artist from 6-9pm.

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Jess & Keegan

A new selection of work from Jess & Keegan on view in the nook gallery.